ok. In a pinch, it'll be fine as long each the port numbers are different, and the folders are different.

Long term, I think it makes sense to add the concept of 'identities' to the wallet and renter, such that one person could have multiple non-overlapping identities in each. But, that's definitely pretty far in the future (unless someone wants to volunteer their time to write the code :))

If Sia started charging coins for bandwidth/throughput (which I think is in your plans), you could even have the first(?) onion network with strict blockchain-based accounting!

One day we may go there. But the implementation overhead of onion routing is high, the expertise requirement is high, and the amount of time it would take to get working is probably 6-9 months. That would be following 1-3 months of raw research to figure out the best way to go about it and to educate ourselves such that we don't make any dumb mistakes. And even then most experts would probably tell people to stay away from the newbie platform (because it's got less review, etc.)

So... one day we will probably chase that. But not in the near future. There are a lot of privacy features I hope we eventually have. (including things like coinjoin)

(note: joash's mining pool is a decentralized mining pool, is fancier than the one I described above, but would also be much better for the ecosystem. Also, it's got a lot of the implementation finished already)

Sia does not compete with Glacier, Sia competes with Amazon S3. So the competition point is actually >$25/Mo. Meaning hosts can charge as much as $15 / TB / Mo (at 1.5 redundancy) and still be competitive (in the long run).

So, it stands to reason that the network's capacity would continue to grow as long as the storage is utilized.

Yes, I believe the number one reason we aren't seeing more hosts is that there's no utilization. And the number one reason we aren't seeing utilization is because the software isn't ready yet to handle massive volumes of files. But it will be soon :)

Yes, that too. Now my intention is not to play down the importance of a strong community. But in the long run the community can take you only so far and that is somehow made visible with the situation of Nxt imo. Superior technology with a good community is in the shadow of inferior but heavily marketed cryptos. So hard core coordinated marketing does have it's place and might even be imperative at some point.

Indeed, that was a large portion of the original idea behind making siacoin inflationary. We want people to use siacoin for storage, not for hoarding or speculating. And, speculating can even destabilize the currency (as we're seeing on Poloniex today). It's not really good for the network to have the price flailing around a lot.

Price flailing is unavoidable while we're in the early phases of growth, but the permanently inflationary aspect of Sia should help eliminate some of the speculation and should encourage using the coin for it's primary purpose - buying storage.

Ah, I realize I missed the original question of the post. Given the number of hosts who are offering 250GB or more of storage, I would guess that the price would increase fairly noticeably if you were to upload 1TB of data today. I'm also guessing that if you moved over 100GB at a time, the price would not increase significantly because people would add more storage to take advantage of the financial opportunity.

I'm more or less making up a number, but off the top of my head it seems reasonable to grow the demand portion of the network by 5-10% per week without dramatically affecting the price. And, even if you do grow the network faster than that, the price should only bump temporarily.

I will advise that the current renting software seems to be buggy enough that I would discourage uploading 1TB of data until we've got the next iteration out. I'm guessing most of your coins would be drained into file contracts that were never utilized. You would get the coins back, but only after 12 weeks. It pains me to ask you to wait, but I do think that's the smartest move. I don't think the software is ready yet.

More exchanges is always a good idea. They generally seem hard to approach though. The voting system on some (lousy) exchanges seems totally rigged, or worse simply a way for exchanges to collect voting fees. Is there a Chinese exchange similar to Poloniex, that lists a large number of altcoins?

'siad' will run from whatever folder you run the executable. If you run 'siad' from the home folder, it'll create a directory structure in the home folder. If you run it from your 1TB external, it'll create the directory structure from there. You can point 'siad' to a different directory with the -d or --sia-directory flag.

Excuse me but... what's the point? Syncthing basically does what you describe (let several device "subscribe to each other" and receive broadcasts that files are new/changed), except without any pesky centralized service, but in an almost fully peer-to-peer fashion (there is a central "discovery" service, I'd rather a DHT but they don't have that for now).
It is, of course, open source and everything, so I'm not sure why I would reinvent the wheel.

The thing above and beyond this that I would like to eventually see is being able to connect to Sia (without any centralized service) and access my files by simply using a passphrase, which could generate some kind of key on the fly.